What is God?)

I have spoken of God as a super-entity, one that we are all components of. I have referenced both Paul’s allegory of the Body of Christ and the Hindu notion of universal consciousness.

This sort of aggregate view of God is different from other teachings that I believe, though. I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has one of the most individualized notions of God, about as far away as you can get from viewing the Almighty as an abstract aggregate.

So, is all this talk about God, the super-entity, purely theoretical to me? An interesting thought experiment and nothing more? No. Personally, I don’t have any qualms about believing in both an individual and an abstract God.

Concrete Conceptions)

It is our natural tendency to try and explain something so that it becomes concrete to us. Religions often describes a very specific version of God, because people need a specific, concrete idea of what they are directing their faith towards.

But most religions also teach that God is beyond comprehension. He is not simply a more powerful version of ourselves, but part of an entirely different classification that exceeds the limits of our mortal minds. Thus, the concrete ideas of God may indeed identify true aspects of Him, but there is no way that they can capture the entire thing.

We know that we cannot conceptualize all of God. There are parts of Him that we might know are right, and parts that we think are partly right, and parts that we don’t know one way or the other, but which possibly could be right. And beyond all of those, there are almost certainly other parts that we don’t know anything about at all, but which bind all the other parts together.

In the book Flatland, a square in a two-dimensional world meets a sphere intersecting with the plane of his existence, appearing only as a slice of its original self: a circle. The sphere raises and lowers itself through that two-dimensional slice, becoming a larger and smaller circle. To the square the sphere appears as different, changing beings, but it is all the same sphere in the end.

Could it be that God is the same? As a higher dimensional being, could it be that God is able to be both simultaneously one and many?

Worshipping in Spirit)

Perhaps it was this uncertain and unknowable aspect of God that Jesus alluded to when he said that we “must worship [God] in spirit.” Because God is of a higher order, and is incomprehensible to our minds, at the end of the day we can only direct our fealty in His general direction. We worship the overall spirit of what we perceive Him to be, devoting ourselves to our imperfect conception of Him, waiting for the next life to fully understand Him as a whole.

In either case, I find the questions of what the nature of God is, and what His “body” is, and what it is in relation to us, and what that means for how we ought to view reality to be most intriguing. These questions yield all manner of thoughtful introspection. This will conclude my study in this area for now, though it is an area that is still active in my mind, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I revisit it at some point. Thank you for accompanying me on this journey.